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4. Critical Visuality or Global Subsumption?: Neoliberal Biopolitics, Chilean Visual Arts, and the Economic Text
- University of Pittsburgh Press
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87 Neoliberalism is too often invoked as either the explanation or the problem, as something that has exhausted itself or that has been all too triumphant. It is for this project precisely what remains to be explained. Taking a cue from the work that Michel Foucault began to explore in his 1978 seminar on neoliberal governmentality, where he focuses specifically on the postwar German Freiburg School and the Chicago School of Economics (Milton Friedman, George Stigler, and Gary Becker, among others), and Giorgio Agamben’s work on bare life and the concentration camp, I examine the intimate relation between neoliberalism and biopolitics in the case of contemporary Chile.1 For the Chilean case, the focus on the Chicago School of Economics is, of course, by no means an arbitrary one. As I explore in chapter 2 in relation to the concept of human capital, it directly and symbolically impacted the Chilean economy and Chilean politics after the 1973 coup (directly, with the adoption of its economic reforms and the presence of economic advisors who studied there, and symbolically, 4 critical viSuality or gloBal SuBSumption? Neoliberal Biopolitics, Chilean Visual Arts, and the Economic Text There is something that is even more unsettling than the malaise of subjectivity in the anonymity of capital: the anonymous life of capital in the hidden fragments of each subjectivity. [Hay algo más tenebroso aun que el malestar de la subjetividad en el anonimato del capital, esto es: la vida anónima del capital en los fragmentos más recónditos de cada subjetividad.] —Federico Galende, “Diagnosticos de época” 88 CRITICAL VISUALITY OR GLOBAL SUBSUMPTION? as Milton Friedman’s speech in Santiago following 11 September 1973 attests). The counterpoint Foucault establishes between the forms of neoliberalism theorized by the German postwar Freiburg liberals and the Chicago School economists is instructive because it highlights just how radical the latter’s proposal actually is. According to Foucault, the Freiburg liberals have an antinaturalist notion of the market: it is not a natural economic reality with intrinsic laws, but rather is constituted and maintained by constant political intervention. Within this scheme “pure competition” never naturally—or even fully—occurs; instead there is the sense of the market as an incessant and active politics . As a consequence there is not a negative conception of the state, where the state and the market are juxtaposed, but rather the one mutually presumes the existence of the other. Within this framework the economy is not a domain of autonomous rules and laws, but a space of constant social intervention and political regulation. Neither is there an all-determining logic of capital, but rather an economicinstitutional entity that is historically open and can be changed politically . Thus, the difference between the Freiburg liberals and classic eighteenth-century liberalism is that the former propose that massive state intervention is necessary to anchor the entrepreneurial form. This gives the state/market relation a different valence: the Freiburg liberals want a state created on the basis of economic liberty (a form of sovereignty limited to guaranteeing economic activity) instead of, as is the case in the philosophy of Adam Smith, limiting the state in order to establish economic liberty. The Chicago School proposes something else: the expansion of the economic form so that it applies to the totality of the social sphere, thus eliding any difference between the economy and the social. To quote Foucault’s now-famous phrase at the end of his article “The Birth of Biopolitics”: “American neoliberalism seeks . . . to extend the rationality of the market, the schemes of analysis it proposes, and the decision-making criteria it suggests to areas that are not exclusively or not primarily economic.”2 Thus economic analytical schemata and the criteria for economic decision making are applied to spheres of life that are not exclusively economic. What this represents is a transition from trying to govern society in the name of the economy (the [3.144.31.175] Project MUSE (2024-04-17 22:51 GMT) CRITICAL VISUALITY OR GLOBAL SUBSUMPTION? 89 project of the Freiburg liberals) to redefining the social sphere as an economic domain. The economy is no longer considered one social domain among others, but an area that embraces the entirety of human action. As a result, rational economic action becomes the allencompassing principle of legitimation. To reiterate, Foucault signals two principal differences between classical liberalism and neoliberalism: the redefinition of the relation between the state and the economy, where the market becomes the organizing...